On 30/04/20 08:44, Vincent Guittot wrote: > On Thu, 30 Apr 2020 at 01:13, Valentin Schneider > <valentin.schneider@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> >> On 28/04/20 06:02, Scott Wood wrote: >> > These patches mitigate latency caused by newidle_balance() on large >> > systems, by enabling interrupts when the lock is dropped, and exiting >> > early at various points if an RT task is runnable on the current CPU. >> > >> > When applied to an RT kernel on a 72-core machine (2 threads per core), I >> > saw significant reductions in latency as reported by rteval -- from >> > over 500us to around 160us with hyperthreading disabled, and from >> > over 1400us to around 380us with hyperthreading enabled. >> > >> > This isn't the first time something like this has been tried: >> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20121222003019.433916240@xxxxxxxxxxx/ >> > That attempt ended up being reverted: >> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/5122CD9C.9070702@xxxxxxxxxx/ >> > >> > The problem in that case was the failure to keep BH disabled, and the >> > difficulty of fixing that when called from the post_schedule() hook. >> > This patchset uses finish_task_switch() to call newidle_balance(), which >> > enters in non-atomic context so we have full control over what we disable >> > and when. >> > >> > There was a note at the end about wanting further discussion on the matter -- >> > does anyone remember if that ever happened and what the conclusion was? >> > Are there any other issues with enabling interrupts here and/or moving >> > the newidle_balance() call? >> > >> >> Random thought that just occurred to me; in the grand scheme of things, >> with something in the same spirit as task-stealing (i.e. don't bother with >> a full fledged balance at newidle, just pick one spare task somewhere), >> none of this would be required. > > newly idle load balance already stops after picking 1 task Mph, I had already forgotten your changes there. Is that really always the case for newidle? In e.g. the busiest->group_type == group_fully_busy case, I think we can pull more than one task. > Now if your proposal is to pick one random task on one random cpu, I'm > clearly not sure that's a good idea > IIRC Steve's implementation was to "simply" pull one task from any CPU within the LLC domain that had > 1 runnable tasks. I quite like this since picking any one task is almost always better than switching to the idle task, but it wasn't a complete newidle_balance() replacement just yet. > >> >> Sadly I don't think anyone has been looking at it any recently.
